What is "Vertex Weight" ?

A Forum Thread for Source Engine

Hi there! Ehh.....well, I heard some weeks ago about "Vertex weight" available for Source engine modding and that kind of stuff. But I don't really know what it means and I'm very insecure about may definition of it.

Also, I remember seeing it a lot of times on MIlkshape 3D when exporting .smd's references and more stuff.

Posts

Would like to know as well. I've heard about it for some time now. It's something GoldSrc doesn't have and when you port stuff from Source to GoldSrc, model some times doesn't look perfect and can never be fixed because the vertex weight is unsupported. That's all I know...

It's the measure of how strong a particular vertex is bound to a particular bone.

Say one vertex is weighted entirely on one bone, now animating that bone will move that vertex. If another vertex is weighted between full and none, it'll move only somewhat with the bone. This can be used for organic animations, like bending an arm, wagging a tail, or a blade of grass blowing in the wind. One example is this, or this:Notice how the shoulder also moves some vertices next to it and not moving like an independent block.

it allows for smoother animations to be created, say, the csgo hands in 1.6, they sometimes look a bit broken, thats because 1 vertex can only be affected by 1 bone only, in source you can have 1 vertex attached to multipe bones, that being said, the wrist look better in csgo since the geometry there is affected by both the forearm bone and the hand bone, so it gives for a smoother result and eliminates the clipping on the model... another example when exporting css animations, sometimes you've seen the arm looks broken, thats because there is no vertex weight happening, this is a good example